End the Chinese Trade Deficit -- Ban the Goody Bag

After a couple of weekends of birthday parties and Valentine's Day a very recent memory, small utterly useless and instantly breakable tschochkes litter the apartment. I live in the midst of a neighborhood that values educational toys -- especially those handcrafted with certified organic vegetable compound paint by fair-traded artisans in non-Chinese third world countries -- and yet, plastic yo yos that cannot even manage one "yo," little maze games where the thingy that shoots the ball doesn't retract and unsharpenable pencils mark every event.

Goody bags are the base expectation of all children, part of this whole self esteem movement I suppose. Our kids are so precious that every moment of their childhoods must come with it's own unique collection of crap. Even Valentine's day -- which I remember as a few mangy construction paper hearts stuck in collapsing mailboxes we "crafted," now comes with candy and more stuff glued to the cards. I've heard much of the gift giving culture of Japan, and experienced the rituals that go on in Greece and Romania and fear that we are creating a market for useless things and children who see all toys as disposable but expected.

The clearinghouse for all things goody bag is a smart organization called Oriental Trading (http://www.orientaltrading.com)/ that abides by no SPAM laws. If you're a mom, they find you and they mail you. If worst of all somewhere online you entered your kids birthday, the emails come cleverly close to when you need to deal with the party issue. Even if you've planned a modest, in-home affair, your kid has been ingrained to believe that all parties have themes, and Oriental Trading is there to supply. From superheroes to My Pretty Pony Pinatas -- they sell it all, even the fillers cause it's so damn hard to get those mini-sized candies in every grocery and drug store.

I've done my own small part by initiating a "ban the bag" movement with mixed success. (This is another topic you cannot mention to other parents as they are either very pro or very anti, and it's impossible to predict.) One year I went online and designed by own version of the "718" t-shirt which Brooklyn hipsters started wearing in the late '90s to designate their independence from the island and area code of Manhattan. Only get this, it was supposed to be a bowling shirt, cause we were have a bowling themed party and of course actually played bowling at this weird alley across from the huge cemetary where the woman who serves the platters of fried stuff, snaps gum and calls you "hon." The irony of the shirt of course was lost on the kids and even though I had tied them into a nice package with a ribbon, one kid said "is this it?" before being yanked off by their parent.

I did better with a nice marker set for the girl birthday this year -- though one parent noted that I should have included our truly favorite product, the Magic Wall Eraser, a 5 star product according to e-pinions (http://www.epinions.com/content_152645504644). It's made by Mr Clean, but now also sold in a generic version 2 for $1.19 at Duane Reade!.

When it came time for my son's birthday, I fell down on the job and succumbed to the lure of cheap Chinese merchandise. His is over the Christmas break and I kind of had a lot to do and couldn't think of or find anthing useful after the usual holiday glut. So, I went to the emporium of true crap: the 99 Cent Store. (Hope I'm not doing something like ratting on Santa Claus' real identity, but most of the merchandize there is actually made for these stores so it can be packaged and sold in 99 cent sizes.) I got packs of glitter glue for the girls -- so evil of me to be sex specific in my neighborhood -- and boy child picked out the close-out of Johnny Depp as the flagrant pirate character puzzles. The latter was truly unuseful but at least there was no plastic, it cost 99 cents and could be recycled, or in my case, used as a particularly effective fire starter.